Insight Crime by STEVEN DUDLEY 3/21/2023
Regardless of whether Mexican criminal organizations are synthesizing fentanyl at home or are getting it from abroad, the Mexican government’s stiff posture is more about its fraught history with the United States on drug matters than on the reality of the fentanyl trade itself.
The controversy got its steam during a morning news briefing on March 9, during which Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told reporters that Mexico’s criminal groups do not synthesize fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that has left hundreds of thousands dead of overdoses in the United States in the last half-decade and is already starting to take its toll on Mexico’s northern cities.
“Here, we do not produce fentanyl nor have fentanyl consumption. We’re really sorry about what is happening in the United States, but why don’t they … combat fentanyl distribution?” he said.
Still, the debate around whether fentanyl is synthesized in Mexico goes back years. And it is laced with problems regarding data, semantics, and the history of US-Mexico relations.
The DataChina used to supply the vast amount of fentanyl Mexican criminal groups obtained and trafficked to the United States, mostly via blue, counterfeit Oxycodone pills known as M30s. It came hidden in shipping containers, concealed in people’s luggage, or buried in a FedEx parcel. The same was true for the United States, which got a vast amount of fentanyl directly from China via the US Postal service and private carriers to the point where, in the early days of the fentanyl crisis, most of it came directly from China, according to data collected by the US State Department, the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and the Homeland Security Investigations Office, among others.
This appears to have changed when China, first in 2017 and then again in 2019, enacted a series of measures to regulate the manufacturing and trade of fentanyl and fentanyl analogues. Data shows that since then, seizures at US postal facilities dropped precipitously. Simultaneously, seizures of fentanyl crossing the US southern border skyrocketed. They also jumped significantly in Mexico. All of this pointed toward the production of fentanyl in Mexico.
What’s more, there were also numerous seizures of what are known as precursor chemicals entering Mexico or inside Mexico. In one case, a US customs officer was captured with ANPP, a fentanyl precursor, while trying to cross the border. When authorities went to the post office in the United States where he’d collected the chemicals, they found records of 13 other pickups.
In another case in May 2020, Mexican authorities seized almost 170 kilograms of ANPP and NPP (a precursor to ANPP) in the Ensenada port in Baja California. In a more recent case, the Navy seized more than three tons of propionyl chloride -- a substance that acts as an intermediary chemical in fentanyl synthesis -- at the Manzanillo port. And between 2021 and 2022, the Army seized almost a ton of ANPP in Sinaloa, what is considered the epicenter of synthetic drug production in the country.
Still, there are problems with the data. Neither the United States nor Mexico gives estimates of the seized fentanyl’s purity. Purity is a critical issue since what is seized in Mexico or on the border normally has less than 10% purity, and what is seized coming directly from China has more than 90% purity.
More:
https://insightcrime.org/news/mexico-posture-fentanyl-says-us-mexico-relations/
